Like when you’re speaking with someone and lose your train of thought, and you’re like “damn what was i just gonna say” then you back track a little bit and hear or seee something that relates to what you were saying and it instantly brings back the memory you were having trouble retrieving.
In: Biology
Cause and effect. That picture, sound or initial thought was the original trigger for the thing you cannot remember. Revisiting the original trigger once more sparks the thought that you could not remember.
There’s roughly 80-90 billion neurons in an average brain, and there are over 100 trillion connections between them. Sometimes those memory connections can fade a bit, for any number of reasons. You didn’t think about something enough to commit it to memory (like what you had for breakfast last Monday) or maybe it’s something you haven’t thought about in a long time (your 1st grade teacher’s name). The connection is still there, but it takes a very heavy stimulus to activate it. You can’t remember off the top of your head what you had for breakfast, but someone says French toast and it all comes back.
Simply put: there’s a lot of connections between our brain cells. Sometimes one connection is weak while another is strong.
It depends on who’s driving the control board and where the colored balls are stored, either in long term or as a core memory. Check out the documentary “Inside Out” for more info.
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